Digital workflow software provider ServiceNow is working with state and foreign governments to help speed up their coronavirus vaccination efforts, and is targeting Federal government organizations for the same services as they roll out more aggressive steps to boost vaccination rates.
The company announced last week that it was working with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, and overseas with healthcare provider NHS Scotland, to use the company’s Vaccine Management Administration solution to help remove logistical barriers in order to speed the immunization process.
“We are working with various governments and organizations across the world to support, track, and manage COVID testing and be the foundation for their vaccine distribution programs,” the company told MeriTalk. Those efforts include putting the vaccine solution on the radar for Federal government customers, it said.
“Distributing, administering, and monitoring vaccinations is the greatest workflow challenge of our time,” said ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott in a statement last week. “We are harnessing the power of our Now Platform to provide government agencies and others worldwide the scale, speed, and flexibility needed. ServiceNow’s Vaccine Administration Management solves the last-mile challenges of keeping people healthy and safe.”
Covering that “last mile” in the process, the company said, is hindering organizations that don’t have the necessary processes and infrastructure to vaccinate people quickly.
Jonathan Alboum, ServiceNow’s Principal Data Strategist for U.S. Federal Government, explained in an interview with MeriTalk that the ServiceNow platform is the basis for its vaccine command center solution that gathers together, integrates, and leverages disparate data sets and creates workflows for government leadership to more efficiently drive the vaccine delivery process.
“You have to track vaccine delivery, manage inventory, schedule health care providers and vaccine recipients, manage all of the PPE that’s required, capture feedback, and track outcomes,” he said of the process.
Alboum, who was CIO at the Agriculture Department from 2015 to 2017, said the vaccination management solution tracks with President Biden’s call for a “whole of government” approach to the problem. “It’s a recognition that you can’t just create a vaccine and hand it off,” he said. Administering vaccines “requires coordination across varying levels of government, and there are times when those interconnections can break down,” Alboum said. “When you think about the complexity of the process, the information hand-offs can be a really big challenge.”
“It’s all about managing workflow,” he said. “The integration of data and connections between disparate systems is critical if we are to turn vaccines into vaccinations, and that’s what ServiceNow does very well.”
ServiceNow said it will be introducing more solutions to help improve last-mile vaccination efforts in the coming weeks.
